Index Ventures

` loads with all the ceremonial weight of a $12 billion fund announcing their Series A in Comic Sans. Index Ventures has somehow managed to build a website that screams "we definitely know what we're doing with technology" while simultaneously serving 847KB of minified React for what is essentially a glorified business card with a contact form. Their webpack bundle analysis reads like a meditation on excess: three separate versions of Lodash, two competing animation libraries, and enough polyfills to support Internet Explorer 6 browsers that stopped existing during their first fund. The performance audit reveals an LCP of 4.2 seconds – longer than most startups survive their Series B pitch meetings.

Diving into their `main.js` reveals the architectural philosophy of a firm that clearly learned web development from the same consultants who convinced them that "synergy" was still a viable buzzword in 2024. The codebase suggests a Gatsby build process that someone abandoned mid-refactor, leaving behind commented-out GraphQL queries and unused CSS classes like `investment-philosophy-revolutionary` that never made it past the wireframe stage. Their GitHub repo (accidentally public for three weeks in 2023) showed 47 commits with messages like "fix the thing" and "sarah said make it more blue." The irony crystallizes when you realize this is the same firm that funded three different developer tool startups while their own `package.json` contains dependencies last updated during the Obama administration.

The tracking implementation reads like a masterclass in surveillance capitalism performance art. Seventeen different analytics scripts fight for dominance in the browser console, including two installations of Google Tag Manager that appear to be tracking each other in an infinite loop of attribution confusion. Their HubSpot integration loads before critical CSS, ensuring that marketing attribution data flows faster than actual content to human eyeballs. The privacy policy promises GDPR compliance while simultaneously fingerprinting visitors with enough precision to determine their coffee preferences and startup exit history. Meanwhile, their portfolio page loads headshots through an unoptimized CDN that serves 4MB images at full resolution, because apparently venture capitalists photograph exclusively in IMAX quality.

The mobile experience transforms their desktop mediocrity into a genuinely surreal user journey. Touch targets overlap like competing term sheets, while their hero animation – a particle system representing "the interconnected nature of innovation" – manages to crash Mobile Safari with the reliability of a pre-revenue startup's server infrastructure. The responsive breakpoints appear to have been tested exclusively on devices that don't exist: too wide for phones, too narrow for tablets, perfectly sized for the fever dreams of a UX designer who's never seen actual humans use the internet. Navigation requires the spatial reasoning skills typically reserved for Series A due diligence, while form submissions trigger loading states that last longer than the average startup runway.